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Sunday, February 27, 2011

RIBMosaic Updates

As mentioned in November last year, RIBMosaic has been placed into the Aqsis repository after Eric stopped his development on the addon. The intent was to allow anyone else to join the project and continue working on it. Several hands went up into the air on this one, including myself until I actually tried to dissect the code and realized that my programming skills do not match up. To complicate things the Blender API has been changing quite often which caused RIBMosaic to break and cease functioning after a certain revision, which of course has not been a recent one. At the same time the work done on Project Widow reverted back to Blender 2.49b until a time when it is possible to use the new software, we really wanted to stress test the newer code, however the stability of RIBMosaic prevented this from happening.

Recently there has been some work done to RIBMosaic, not by the Aqsis development team but by someone who has been a user of RIBMosaic since the early days, he simply wanted to see it live on. NFZ (Jeff Doyle) has provided some patches to the Aqsis git repository that will make RIBMosaic function in recent Blender 2.5x revisions.

"So does the patched RibMosic work with the latest official Beta release of Blender 2.56a? No. A recent Build with svn rev 35000 or greater is needed. Blender svn trunk revision number is around 35100 as of 22 Feb 2011. The Blender python API is still going through a lot of changes so its easier to keep up with the changes rather than focus on a previous release. Not good for users since they would have to get an up to date build of Blender every few days but until the API stabilizes that is the way its going to be :). http://www.graphicall.org/builds/ has daily builds for most OS so for those that want to play that is a good route."

Wow, didn't expect to see this on the Blender to RenderMan site so soon.

Don't get too excited yet. The updated RIBMosaic exporter code has not been committed to the sourceforge git repository. I have submitted the first patch to the Aqsis team for review. The first patch just makes the exporter loadable in Blender built from svn trunk which will soon be 2.57.

There is still a lot of work to be done on the exporter but ya, you can keep an eye on development by checking out the get repository on sourceforge or read about the development on the Aqsis forum.